Test-Driven Recipes and Writing Excel Files

Welcome to yet another edition of the Java newsletter. Our five-year mission is to seek out and find new and interesting tips, techniques, and projects to make you more productive.

We're gearing up for some big articles in the coming weeks. Here's what's
new this week:

Jakarta's POI project has opened up the Microsoft file formats to Java
programmers. After the previous article
introducing POI, fearless authors Andrew Oliver and Avik Sengupta report that
two-thirds of their feedback asked, "How do I read and write Excel files with
POI?" This week, they're back with an article called, unsurprisingly, Reading and
Writing Excel Files with POI.

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In the first of five recipes excerpted from the new "Java Extreme
Programming Cookbook," Erik M. Burke and Brian M. Coyner demonstrate how to configure your development environment to support test-driven development.
Learn how to configure HttpUnit, JUnit, Tomcat, and Ant in Cooking with Java XP, Part 1.

It's unclear what exactly makes a good language. Some argue that it should
fit the problem domain. Others counter that it should fit your head. Some
like syntactic or semantic or mathematical purity. Others just want to get the
job done quickly.

It may be impossible to say without resorting to, "I just like it better
than the alternatives." Still, it's food for thought, especially where we have
a chance to influence the current and next generations of programming, by
developing new tools, discovering new idioms, writing new libraries, and, in
some cases, helping to reinvent programming for the next generation.

We've several good articles in the queue, including enumerations in Java,
Java web server basics, and more about QuickTime and Java.